Back in the TARDIS, I shut the door as I was the last one to enter. The Doctor was already adjusting the settings on the controls and started the dematerialisation as soon as the door was closed.
The engines whirred with a noise that sounded like somebody had left the handbrake on. Coincidence?
I was itching to start maintenance as soon as possible, but one look at Rose told me she hadn't exactly processed our previous adventure yet.
Rose went straight to the railing and gripped it with both hands, knuckles white. The Doctor wandered around the console, flicking a few idle switches just to keep his hands busy. I stayed near the doors for a second, listening to everyone breathe.
"Right!" the Doctor said suddenly, too bright. "That was fun."
I raised an eyebrow. So this is what it's like. Watching the show, it was always visible how out of touch the Doctor is with this sort of thing, especially this incarnation, but experiencing it personally it's painfully obvious how much he can't read the room.
"Fun," Rose repeated flatly.
"Well," he amended, "eventful. Bit of sightseeing, bit of nearly dying, bit of saving the day. That's a solid afternoon."
Rose turned slowly to face him.
"We just watched my planet burn," she said. "Then you killed a woman."
The words hung in the air like a dropped wrench.
The Doctor's smile vanished.
"She killed them," he said, voice sharp. "All those people on Platform One, just numbers on a ledger to her. She would've done it again."
"You still let her die," Rose said. "You could've saved her."
He opened his mouth, shut it again, and ran a hand over his face.
"Everything has its time and everything dies," he said eventually.
"That's not an answer," she shot back.
He winced.
I watched him struggle, watched Rose's face set, and realised the silence about to stretch out between them would only get uglier.
I contemplated. Originally they were supposed to arrive back on Earth so Rose could see that people in her time were still fine. That what happens five billion years away is such a distant event.
The Doctor would then open up to her just a little and talk about our planet's destruction. Our planet. It's simultaneously weird and natural to call Gallifrey home.
But I digress. They would then eat chips and ride off into the sunset. Did my presence change this? Or is this just an off-screen conversation that happened on the way to Earth? I glanced at the navigation system. We were in deep space, no destination set, just orbiting the local cluster.
Butterfly effect, huh. I wonder what exactly I changed to alter the timeline. Well, the timeline isn't broken, so I guess it's fine. Ish.
Back to the topic: the Doctor and Rose were clearly agitated for different reasons, and neither of them had the clear head right now to handle this. Luckily I did, so I did the stupid or smart, depending on how you look at it, thing and stepped in.
"Rose," I said gently, "you're right. He could've saved her."
The Doctor's head snapped toward me, eyes flashing.
"And he's right too," I added. "She chose herself over everyone else. Twice. Sometimes the universe doesn't step in to cushion the landing, if you catch my drift."
"That's easy for you to say," Rose muttered. "You weren't the one turning the dial."
She looked like she wanted to argue. With me, with herself, with the way she'd lived all her life.
Instead, she sagged against the railing, shoulders dropping a fraction.
"You take a lot on yourself, don't you?" Rose said, looking between us. "The both of you."
"Someone has to," the Doctor muttered.
Rose rubbed her eyes and sniffed.
"So what now?" she asked. "We just… go somewhere else?"
"That's the idea," the Doctor said, forcing some cheer back into his voice. "Big universe. Plenty of trouble we haven't seen yet."
"Before you fling us at the next disaster," I cut in, "I'd like to keep a promise."
He frowned.
"What promise?"
I patted the console affectionately.
"I told her I'd give her a proper service," I said. "Full diagnostic. She's running on brute force, luck, and your charming personality. Two of those aren't sustainable."
The TARDIS gave a soft, approving hum.
"So why don't you two go grab some food," I added, "and in the meantime I'll take a look around and assess the damage?"
The Doctor crossed his arms.
"Assess the damage? She's fine," he said.
"She's functional," I corrected. "That's not the same as fine."
Rose perked up a little, glad for a different subject.
"Wait, you can actually fix her?"
"I can tune her," I said. "TARDISes don't really get 'fixed'. They get coaxed into…behaving better."
"Can I watch?" Rose asked, hopeful.
"No—" And before she could complain I continued, "Even a doctor—" I made eye contact with the Doctor at the pun; he just rolled his eyes. "—will ask the relatives to wait outside. This is personal. She doesn't want people loitering around while I poke at sensitive bits."
"That's just not fair." Rose threw her arm out, but more out of playfulness; she seemed to understand.
"Breakfast?" I asked, looking between the two of them.
The Doctor, as if answering, adjusted the navigation and started going into an explanation about the culinary state of the 21st century. Rose joined him as the obedient listener.
Now that those two were sorted out and I was no longer in their way, I headed deeper inside the TARDIS.
***
I pressed my palm flat on the nearest panel and closed my eyes.
"Okay, old girl," I murmured. "Let's see what we're working with."
Assimilate fired up in my head. Systems, circuits, dimensional components—all of it unfolded in my head like a schematic drawn in light.
Seeing the TARDIS like this was amazing. Of course I had my memories as the Engineer, but no matter how vividly Time Lords can perceive their own timeline, memories are memories, and seeing things with your own two eyes is something you can't even compare to.
She was beautiful.
A mess, but beautiful.
"Whoa," I breathed. "You've been busy."
Images and impressions flickered across my mind: refits, regenerations, emergency bodge jobs after the Time War, coral grown in a hurry to patch fractures in her heart, the time rotor.
I started small, letting my hands follow instinct. I eased one dial a fraction to smooth out the temporal buffer, feel the vibration underfoot soften, then let my thoughts drift.
I couldn't help grinning. This. I like this. I spent all my life living as a corporate slave in a world that already perfected the recipe on how to keep people in line. Aside from work and sleep you had no time to do anything else, or if you did somehow manage to free up space then you had no energy left.
I reached to another panel, gently separating three sensor arrays that had been arguing with each other for decades and giving each its own clean channel. The hum around me shifted, less strained.
So I couldn't help but laugh quietly at the prospect that now I'm finally free to live.
Speaking of which, I could see how my presence can actually stir the timeline. I rerouted a power conduit that had been sharing a line with the noisiest part of the engines—no wonder she'd been howling whenever the Doctor floored it—and watched the stress readings drop.
Small acts change small things, but those small things could result in disasters. Take the Doctor and Rose for example. If I hadn't stepped in it was very likely they wouldn't have handled their argument properly, simply because they talked in the TARDIS instead of back on Earth.
I tightened a feedback regulator, listening as the temporal field evened out another notch.
Did Rose not ask to be brought back home because my extra presence felt comforting enough to her? Or did the Doctor not even consider the possibility because I'd already prevented friction back on Platform One, so given how natural this felt to him it didn't even occur to him how a human straight off the street would react to all this?
I moved to a different panel, clearing a cluster of minor errors the TARDIS had been quietly compensating for on her own. Lights above me shifted from harsh white to a warmer amber.
So now what. If I stay here I'll change things without knowing, and if those changes result in problems I can't handle or fix in time, then a companion might as well leave on day one. If Rose had left, then no Bad Wolf, no growth for the Doctor, and the tenth incarnation might be someone completely different.
I paused, fingers resting on a housing, feeling the ship breathe around me.
But what options do I even have? If I leave the TARDIS… then what? What would I even do?
I nudged a failing coupler back into alignment and watched the strain on the drive drop.
I guess I could scavenge enough parts to get out of Earth and go to the nearest space hub to… do something there. Or I could just ask the Doctor to drop me at said hub in, I don't know, the 50th century to begin with.
What would I even do there? I guess leaving the TARDIS would simply mean ordinary space adventure. I mean, it could work. I am a role model specimen from the smartest species in this universe. My cheat skill from the Entity will allow me to thrive almost anywhere. Well, let me lock this option in for now.
I adjusted a stabiliser calibration, listening as the TARDIS gave a little contented sigh through the floor.
Or, if I decide to stay here, I guess I could wait around for Jack to remake Torchwood and join them. They'll have plenty of stuff to deal with as well. Maybe I could borrow his vortex manipulator and have a "we have TARDIS at home" version of space-time shenanigans.
Or maybe I just don't think too hard about things I can't control and let nature do its thing. Yeah, so what if the Doctor's timeline changes, not my problem, I'm the protagonist here, not him.
I winced at my own thought.
Uh. Saying that is so messed up.
Decisions, decisions.
As for having my own TARDIS? Now that would be the optimal outcome. Question is, how? How would I even get one of those?
I checked a growth node and felt her respond by slowly knitting a stress fracture in a supporting column.
Growing my own? I mean, I could ask for a seed and nurture it for a couple decades. Time I have, after all. Or, since I know Gallifrey isn't actually destroyed and I know where to find it, I could sneak back in to also steal one. Haha, that would actually be hilarious.
The TARDIS made a noise that told me she found that idea hilarious too.
"Eh? How?" I muttered aloud, then remembered: right, for maintenance I'm holding a telepathic connection to her, so some of my surface thoughts are bleeding across to her. Well, as long as she won't tell on me, haha.
Back to topic. So. Gallifrey.
If I don't care about canon, why don't I just tell the Doctor that Gallifrey is not gone? Maybe I'd see a version of Nine like nobody else did before me. Ah, so many options and I don't know what to do.
Well, for now I'll do what I can do right here and figure out the rest later.
***
After about an hour of surface-level adjustments, I leaned back from the console and cracked my neck.
"Right," I said. "That's the easy bit. For the deeper stuff, I'll need to get underneath."
Rose, who had come back by then with the Doctor, frowned.
"Underneath what?"
I pointed at the grating in the floor leading down under the main console.
"Basement," I said. "TARDISes have crawl spaces. Conduits. Junction nodes. Lots of places to bang your head."
"So you're going crawling around under the floorboards of a time machine?" she asked.
"Pretty much."
"Can I come?"
"No," said the Doctor.
"Yes," I said.
We both looked at each other.
"She'll get lost," he said.
"She'll stay where I tell her," I said. "Won't you?"
Rose shrugged.
"I mean, I don't fancy getting stuck in a pipe," she said. "But I'd like to see more than just this room and my bed."
The Doctor hesitated. His protectiveness wrestled with his curiosity and his desire not to admit he didn't know every nook of his own ship.
"Fine," he said at last. "But if you fall into a temporal manifold, I am not fishing you out."
"I'll bring a rope," I said.
***
The access hatch opened with a protesting creak that told me it hadn't been used for anything but emergency hat-grabs in a long time.
A faint blue glow filtered up from below, along with the smell of warm metal, old dust, and that indescribable scent of "inside a machine that thinks".
"After you," I said to Rose.
"Very funny," she said. "You first."
I climbed down the ladder, boots clanging lightly, and stepped into the under-console space. Rose followed more cautiously, gripping each rung like it might decide to vanish.
Down here, the heart of the room felt closer. Conduits ran along the walls and ceiling, pulsing faintly. Crystalline nodes glowed with soft light. Panels were open where someone—probably the Doctor, in a hurry—had yanked them off and never bothered to put them back.
Rose looked around with wide eyes.
"It's like being inside a boiler room designed by a fairy," she said.
"That is surprisingly accurate," I said. "Mind your head."
I ducked under a low beam and patted a junction block affectionately.
"All right, sweetheart," I murmured. "Let's see where you're hurting."
She showed me, and I started patching.
As I worked, Rose settled on an overturned crate and watched.
"So," she said after a while, "was this what you did? Back on… Gallifrey?"
"Pretty much," I said. "Bigger workshops, more shouting. Less running from mannequins."
"Did you like it?"
"Fixing things?" I said. "Yeah. You learn a lot about people from their machines. How they treat them. How much they trust them. How much they take them for granted. TARDISes are… special, though."
"How?"
"They're alive," I said simply, gesturing around me. "They choose you as much as you choose them. Most Time Lords thought of them as tools. Some of us knew better."
"Like you."
"Like me," I said. "Like him."
She picked at a flake of paint on the crate.
"And your world," she said quietly. "It's really gone?"
I hesitated. That came up sooner than expected. For now:
"Yeah," I said. "It's gone."
"I'm sorry," she said.
"Me too," I replied.
We sat in the hum for a second.
"You seem… I don't know. Okay about it," she said. "Not like him."
Oh, they had the conversation? Nice.
"Hm. Different angles," I said. "He was there at the end. I was… elsewhere. Evacuation stuff. I got the news second-hand."
"Does that make it easier?"
"No," I said. "Just… we processed it different."
She chewed her lip.
"Well, once you make peace with the idea and learn how to live with it, you get used to it," I offered.
"Do you?"
I thought about that.
"No," I admitted. "You just get better at pretending."
She nodded slowly, like that made a cruel sort of sense.
"Well," she said eventually, "for what it's worth, I'm glad you're here now. Otherwise we'd all be barbecue."
"Glad to be useful," I said lightly. "I have a brand to maintain."
"'The Engineer'," she said, rolling the name around. "Still weird."
"You'll get used to it," I said.
"I'll try. How do these even work? Are you seriously called that? The Engineer? The Doctor?"
"Hmm, you see, we're not actually born as Time Lords," I said. "We're, at birth, simply Gallifreyan."
I saw the confusion forming and continued before she could ask.
"It's like… you aren't born a 'human being', you're born an Earthling. And if you wanted 'Human' to be a title, you'd have to go through rigorous training and education and so on…"
I paused as a very stupid idea crossed my mind.
Hey, wouldn't that actually solve a lot of problems on Earth? That only if you prove yourself to be an okay-ish individual can you be called human. That would certainly filter out some of the room-temperature IQ individuals. Oh, yet another one of my weird and horrible suggestions.
I realised I'd gone quiet. Rose was watching me with a face that conveyed sympathy. Ah. She probably thought I was absorbed in the horrible reality that my people aren't even considered "my people" unless they prove themselves. Hm. Maybe that Earthling/Human idea would be a terrible one after all.
"…khm… Anyway," I said, "if you want to be a Time Lord you'll need to earn it. You go to the Academy—huge, smug place up in the Citadel—and spend decades buried in temporal mechanics, history, politics, and a lot of exams designed to make you hate clocks. When you're still far too young they stand you in front of the Untempered Schism and let you look directly into the Time Vortex. Some run away, some go mad, some… think very hard and stay."
I checked a relay while I talked, tightening a loose connection.
"If you survive all that, pass your examinations, don't get expelled for blowing up a practice TARDIS, and your tutors don't fail you out of sheer irritation, you get offered the title. They give you a second heart, a full regeneration cycle, access to the big levers instead of just polishing them."
I glanced at her.
"And with that comes an oath, and a name you choose yourself. You stop being just 'who you were' and become the thing you've decided to be."
"What was your oath?" Rose asked quietly.
"In the repair bays under the Citadel," I said, the memory rising unbidden. "Hand on a live console, supervisors glowering from the gantry. I swore:
'I will listen before I touch.
I will mend what I break and leave what I cannot mend.
I will keep engines honest and pilots humble.
I will walk between disaster and design,
and serve the ship, the crew, and the timeline
before my own pride.
This I swear as the Engineer.'"
Rose's eyes widened a little.
"That's… actually kind of nice," she said. "And the Doctor?"
"He took a different sort of oath," I said. "Different name, different weight. The Master picked his. Others picked worse. But once you choose, that's how the universe knows you. It's not just a name, it's a job description you can never quite quit."
"And you picked 'Engineer'?"
"Someone had to fix what the rest of them broke," I said. "Might as well be honest about it."
She smiled.
"Yeah," she said. "That fits."
***
We spent another hour under the console.
I replaced a cracked stabiliser crystal with a spare the TARDIS helpfully grew on the spot. I split a power feed that had been overloaded since at least the Time War and redirected it through a less traumatised relay. I even found the source of that faint rattle in the port-side temporal dampers and, with great satisfaction, removed the offending bolt that had been bouncing around for what felt like centuries.
"Is that it?" Rose asked as I held up the bolt.
"Never underestimate the power of one loose part," I said. "Ask any mechanic."
By the time we climbed back up into the console room, the whole space felt different.
Subtler curves in the hum. A little more spring in the floor. The time rotor's motion was smoother, less jerky.
The Doctor noticed immediately, of course.
"What have you done?" he demanded.
"Tidied up," I said. "She'll still get you into trouble. She'll just take longer to fall apart while doing it."
He laid a hand on the console, eyes narrowing as he listened.
"She's… quieter," he muttered. "In a good way."
"You're welcome," I said.
He gave me a long look.
"You're dangerous," he said at last.
"Professionally," I agreed.
Rose laughed.
***
Later, when she'd wandered off to explore whatever corridor the TARDIS felt like showing her, it was just me and the Doctor by the console.
He leaned against it with his arms folded, watching me as I checked one last reading.
"So," he said, "you're staying, then."
It wasn't really a question.
I met his gaze.
"Unless you plan to throw me out at the next stop," I said.
He considered this.
"Tempting," he said. "But no. You're handy in a crisis. And she likes you." He patted the console.
The TARDIS chimed in agreement.
"And you?" I asked.
He looked away.
"I don't…" He stopped, started again. "I don't know what to make of you yet. Another Time Lord who isn't… them."
"Disappointing, isn't it?" I said softly. "We don't all come with evil cloaks and a world-ending plan."
He huffed a laugh despite himself.
"Give it time," he said.
He tapped the console lightly.
"Next stop," he said, flipping a switch, "somewhere with less fire. I promised you a time machine, and that's what you're getting. Now, you've seen the future, let's have a look at the past. 1860. How does 1860 sound, Rose Tyler?" he called down the corridor.
Her voice drifted back faintly.
"What happened in 1860?"
"I don't know, let's find out," he said cheerfully.
He started setting coordinates. The TARDIS hummed, happier than she'd been in a long time.
I rested my hands on the console, feeling her spin up for the next jump.
Another world. Another mess. More work.
The Doctor grinned at me over the controls.
"Ready, Engineer?"
I smiled back.
"Always, Doctor." I said.
The engines roared, the time rotor surged, and the universe tilted.
We flew on.